There's no point saying "It should be opt-in", because it can't possibly work on an opt-in basis. There's no way to get a sufficient number of opted-in wireless access points. The available options are "Opt-out is OK" or "The service shouldn't exist".

If you want it to act as a phone as well, the best eReader is the iPhone. If you don't, it's the iPod touch.

Everything sold as an eReader has two fatal flaws. First, they're all way too big, in order to have a page size big enough that they can pretend they're like paper books. An eReader should fit in a shirt pocket.

Second, e-Ink displays are horrible. They're grey-on-grey text, and the half second flash and delay on page turning is terribly distracting. LCD is the only way to go at present.

(Yes, I actually do read on my iPhone; I've read over thirty books on it so far this year.)

If the IRS pre-fills what the government knows about on the form, then that tells you what the government doesn't know about, and thus can safely be omitted. If you get a blank form, there's always the risk that the government knows about your offshore account and will prosecute you for omitting it.

David Gerard writes: "Zed Shaw writes an impassioned plea to programmers: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All. "I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know shit when it’s clearly obvious they do not. I’ve been studying it for years and years and still don’t think I know anything. This article is my call for all programmers to finally learn enough about statistics to at least know they don’t know shit. I have no idea why, but their confidence in their lacking knowledge is only surpassed by their lack of confidence in their personal appearance.""

Here's a response that the film and TV industries have never yet tried; how about letting people pay them money for legal downloads without DRM on the day of release? It's impossible to stop people downloading content, so you'd think they could at least experiment with letting people pay them for it rather than giving consumers who want unencumbered and timely content no choice but to pirate.